Chet Richards

Tom Peters once wrote that the real work of any company is done around the water cooler and coffee pot.  In an era of globalization, virtual companies, flex time, and work-from-anywhere, what’s a water cooler?
Tim Leberecht has an idea on News.com today: blogs, but with a twist:
Make it mandatory for every employee to keep an [...]

As luck would have it, Caroline Brothers has an article in today’s NYT that points out three examples of airlines taking advantage of chaos in the marketplace to improve their positions at competitors’ expense. None of these, with the possible exception of Lufthansa, appears to involve the strategy of the TPS — anyone with [...]

Here’s another nifty case study that uses the OODA loop to describe a successful turnaround effort*.
Compellingly titled “An analysis of Stelton’s turnaround from an agility perspective,” (2.2 MB PDF) it describes the actions of an entrepreneur, Michael Ring, to rescue a proud but faded Danish manufacturer of stainless steel dinnerware. Stelton was [...]

You certainly wouldn’t want to do it when times are good — the incumbents, flush with cash and the political power it buys, will crush you. You want to strike when they are weak, confused, and fixated on the one thing they understand: slashing costs, that is, customer service.

All forms of “maneuver,” (used faute de mieux) rely on paradoxes and the quest to resolve them rather than resorting to trade-offs. Maneuver warfare, for example, gets both better control and pumped up initiative, characteristics that trade off under traditional, top-down control systems. The Toyota Production System (TPS) turns out vehicles that exhibit [...]